About the Book

This book showcases how small-scale renewable energy technologies such as solar panels, cookstoves, biogas digesters, microhydro units, and wind turbines are helping Asia respond to a daunting set of energy governance challenges. Using extensive original research this book offers a compendium of the most interesting renewable energy case studies over the last ten years from one of the most diverse regions in the world. Through an in-depth exploration of case studies in Bangladesh, China, India, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka, the authors highlight the applicability of different approaches and technologies and illuminates how household and commercial innovations occur (or fail to occur) within particular energy governance regimes. It also, uniquely, explores successful case studies alongside failures or "worst practice" examples that are often just as revealing as those that met their targets. Based on these successes and failures, the book presents twelve salient lessons for policymakers and practitioners wishing to expand energy access and raise standards of living in some of the world's poorest communities. It also develops an innovative framework consisting of 42 distinct factors that explain why some energy development interventions accomplish all of their goals while others languish to achieve any.

Reviews

A Baker & Taylor Academic Essentials Title in Renewable Energy '…a timely contribution to the energy access theme that has received wider global attention in 2012 as the UN designated the year as the Year of Sustainable Energy for All. The book presents ten case studies that evaluated ten projects or programmes using a common framework offering a set of six successful cases and four unsuccessful ones…I believe [this book] will be useful to researchers and practitioners.' Energy of Sustainable Development

About the Authors

Benjamin Sovacool and Ira Martina Drupady, both of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

About the Series

Routledge Studies in Environmental Policy and Practice

Based on the Avebury Studies in Green Research series, this wide-ranging series still covers all aspects of research into environmental change and development. It will now focus primarily on environmental policy, management and implications (such as effects on agriculture, lifestyle, health etc), and includes both innovative theoretical research and international practical case studies.